Recently, I have been experimenting with Claude AI to see what sort of things it is capable of. One of those experiments involved hooking up a Tang Nano 20k FPGA board to the Sam Coupe.
After a load of wiring, I got to the point where the Sam had the means of sending signals out from its euroconnector and into the FPGA board.
The next question was, what can I actually do with it? So I started chucking some suggestions at Claude. First up, could we make it act as a 4MB memory expansion? After a few iterations and a lot of testing and tweaking, the answer was yes!
So this process continued, each phase came with some hardware tweaks and a ton of testing of each feature. But each time, we added additional functionality to the board without impacting the ones we had already implemented.
My next questions were:
Could we implement the Atom Lite SD Card interface? Yes!
How about real-time clock support? Yes!
An AY Sound chip to allow Spectrum 128k games to run (Most of them, anyway)? Yes!
Could we implement the Paula Sound chip from the Amiga to play MOD Files more accurately? Yes!
The Blue Alpha Speed Synthesiser? Yes!
With an ESP32 hooked up, could we connect to Wi-Fi and have a web server so we can manage the Sam from a browser? Yes!
Could that ESP32 also be used as a modem for the Sam to allow it to connect to BBSs and IRC with a custom written terminal emulator? Yes!
Could we link up an OLED display to show what the interface is doing and display a graphic equaliser when playing music? Yes!
Could we use it to load ROM files into the Sam from the browser page? Yes!
I think that is the stage we are at now, but there is a chance I might have forgotten something! All of this work has been achieved in around 2 weeks of development, which is quite frankly amazing!
Yes, it doesn’t look very pretty at the moment, but it is functional!
I’ve still got a few small features to add and then go back and tidy up the web front end etc. But the fact that this now exists is awesome.
If you are interested in what some of these features look like, then head over to my YouTube channel as I’ve been posting some quick show and tell videos on there over the last week.
North Devon Retro Archive – YouTube Channel